1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data processing methods and systems, and in particular relates to methods and systems for managing e-mail, and more particularly relates to techniques for rating unsolicited e-mail or spam.
2. Background of the Invention
Of the 3.33 trillion e-mail messages sent in 2002, unsolicited and undesirable e-mail (i.e. spam) accounted for about 34% of these messages. By 2006, spam is expected to reach 52% of the total e-mail traffic worldwide. Such spam traffic not only consumes valuable system resources in the routing, delivery and intermediary storage of such spam, but also consumes and wastes the time of end-users who typically must manually filter/delete such unwanted spam messages that are received by the end-user's email system.
Many tools that combat spam have come about in recent years. There tools have features such as: blacklists/whitelists, content analysis tools, behavioral analysis tools, sender address validation, spam fingerprint tools and graphics scanning tools to check for pornography. While some very elaborate systems to detect and report spam have come about, spam still gets through to end-users. Although automated systems work faster, it is also true that the human user can more accurately identify which e-mails are considered undesirable. While that is true, most users do not want to perpetually report spam—even if reporting would provide a future benefit.
It would thus be desirable to provide an improved spam detection system and method that combines the benefits of human intervention accuracy and automation speed/efficiency.